


The Way Forward

by BleedingTypewriter



Series: Keithtober 2019 [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Bottom Keith (Voltron), Friends to Lovers, Galra Keith (Voltron), Human Keith (Voltron), Keith gets his galra period, Keithtober 2019, M/M, Romance, Switch Keith (Voltron), Switch Lance (Voltron), Violent Keith, Violent Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-11-28 11:01:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20965463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BleedingTypewriter/pseuds/BleedingTypewriter
Summary: Being half galra has had its perks and downsides, but having his alien DNA wreak havoc while they're being held prisoner is a new kind of mortifying for Keith.Second piece for Keithtober 2019. Prompt: "Nature"______________“Oh my god, Keith has his Galra period!”Lance.He scrambles gracelessly over, and it’s probably the only reason Krolia isn’t able to stop him. She aims a half-hearted kick at him as he goes, but it’s too high. She’d expected him to get to his feet first. She grits, “I’m sorry, Keith!” but it’s unnecessary. Her foot barely clips his side. He kneels, crawls, slithers, flops to Lance, and if he smacks his cheek against the floor in his blind rush, it’s immediately soothed as he presses it against the jackhammer of Lance’s jugular.





	The Way Forward

**Author's Note:**

> A bit of an alternate take on season 7, episode 3, "The Way Forward."
> 
> Every klance smut authour has to write at least one "Keith goes galra" fic, right? Hopefully I've circumvented a few of the general cliches.
> 
> Note the archive warning, Keith's thoughts and actions do get graphic.

Krolia smells _ It _ coming before it hits. They’re in the belly of a galra cruiser, waiting for interrogation, bound and hoping for Coran to save the eight of them (for a goddamn _ miracle_), and it’s the _ worst possible time _ for It to happen, so of course… 

She turns to her son, eyes narrow and nostrils flared, and barks, “Keith, look at me,” in such an authoritative voice that his spine straightens on instinct. He’s confused when, upon following her instructions, she just hisses, “_Breathe_.”

His lips have just pulled into a loose O, the first inklings of a confused _ ‘What?’, _when _ It _ starts bubbling up his esophagus. The sound he lets out is formless and warbling: _ hooooaaaaah_.

Krolia mutters a series of guttural, non-English words, and tops them off with, “Not _ now_,” and shrugs her shoulders in a useless bid to free the hands bound behind her back.

“What’s going on?” Shiro asks, worried, and he makes as if to get up, but Krolia stops him with a sharp, _ ‘Don’t._’

Keith feels carbonated. Millions of little bubbles are twisting up inside him, just beneath the skin, and when they reach his head they pop thousand by thousand with a constant hiss, leaving a wet, sticky residue over his thoughts. And he doesn’t understand that residue, can’t pick apart all the flavours in it. It’s a syrupy, overpowering taste that sticks in his throat; bitter with rage, sour with helplessness, thick with the urge to protect, sweet with desire…

It’s hard to focus on anything but _ It_, so Keith registers several things belatedly. Krolia gets on her feet and approaches him warily where he’s still kneeling in the corner. She’s saying something, but words are unimportant; they don’t penetrate the _ It _ still dousing his brain. It’s more important that she smells vaguely threatening, and it’s at odds with the familiar, familial smell on her, and it puts Keith on edge. The rest of the people start emanating variations on the same stench—fear, and confusion, and concern—and a fierce urge to ensure their safety has him tugging at his bonds, testing their strength.

“Focus,” he thinks Krolia might be saying. Or something like that. He stops caring altogether when he catches a new scent.

A very_ particular _ scent.

He only notices it because the stink of fear is starting to spike, so strong he runs his tongue over his fangs (distantly, so easy to ignore: _ fangs_?) with the salty taste of it. And with the scent so strong, it’s easy to pick out one of its individual parts; that one person’s specific fear, and wariness, and tension, all rolled into a sickly, cloying, over-applied perfume.

He wants to _ destroy _ whatever is causing that smell; wants to take it between his increasingly sharp teeth and fucking bite it out and chew it up and spit it back all relaxed and pretty, the way it _ should _ be.

He doesn’t realize he’s moving, writhing a little, working at his bonds even though it hurts his wrists, elbows, shoulders. Krolia stops in front of him, and it’s annoying because it blocks his view of the rest of the paladins (and especially that _ one particular paladin_) and he’s trying to figure out the path of least resistance to getting every part of himself over there to (_holdtouchsequesterlove_**_take_**) protect them.

“Move, mother.”

“Come on, Keith, breathe through it.”

“Is he alright?" Allura’s voice. Her breath smells like that close-but-not-quite Altean kind-of-mint, sweeter than the stuff from home, and worry wafts off her in waves of tangy adrenaline and saline alien blood rushing just below the skin. His body jerks in her direction. He wants to kneel in front of her, to maim the next thing that provokes that stench and spit its blood at her feet so she’d know she’s _ safe_, that Keith will protect them, will tear the fucking beating heart out of the Galra for them and devour the half rotten thing…

“He’s fine, he’s just spiking. Keith, focus on _ my _ voice. On _ my _ scent.”

Family. Dangerous. Powerful. Strong blood, _ his _ blood, he’ll show her, he’ll make her proud, she won’t even have to lift a claw and he’ll rip their captors’ throats out for her…

“‘Spiking’? What does that mean?” Shiro’s voice, and he smells like war, like a battle that’s just about to begin on a field that’s already seen action. The fear is muted, the adrenaline controlled; he smells like metal, and old blood, and a stinking rage gone putrid with how long its been contained. He’ll make _ him _proud, too. He’ll waft bloody Galra chunks beneath his nose until that anger bursts out in all its repressed, fungal glory and they’ll massacre every last enemy on this ship together, as brothers…

“_God_, the _ smell_...look, I can’t get into Galran biology right now. It means his hormones are rising rapidly.”

“Is that why he’s going all, uh...Galra-y? With the eyes and stuff?” Sweet, sweet Hunk. Even his terror sweat smells sweet with the barest organic edge, like cotton candy vomit. Keith knows the coming gore will scare him, poor guy. He’ll make it up to him later. He’ll dispatch the Galra near him with mercy they don’t deserve, with broken necks and closed eyes, and…

Laughter.

Laughter, now.

He can taste the exact bittersweet composition of each little exhale in it. _Ha _brave _ha_ afraid _ha_ curious _ha_ worried _ha_ worried about _Keith_ _ha ha_ belonging to Keith_ ha ha _Keith’s_Keith’sKeith’s..._

“Oh my god, Keith has his Galra period!”

_ Lance_.

He scrambles gracelessly over, and it’s probably the only reason Krolia isn’t able to stop him. She aims a half-hearted kick at him as he goes, but it’s too high. She’d expected him to get to his feet first. She grits, “I’m sorry, Keith!” but it’s unnecessary. Her foot barely clips his side. He kneels, crawls, slithers, flops to Lance, and if he smacks his cheek against the floor in his blind rush, it’s immediately soothed as he presses it against the jackhammer of Lance’s jugular.

“_Whoa_, Keith–!”

He’s frightened. _ Really _ frightened; up close there’s an ammonia bite to it. Keith kind of likes it. He’ll show Lance. He’ll show him that it’s okay, that all Keith’s violence and frenzy is _ for _ him, not against. He’ll turn that thick sour fear smell into something sweet-salty-_delicious_.

He follows Lance’s retreat; gets his thighs on either side of his hips and cages him in; nuzzles underneath his jaw where there’s a hint of stubble. He tries to hush Lance, to stop that unnecessary frantic wriggling, but his fangs mangle the _ shhh_. The fear smell gets stronger, so intense Keith gags a little on it. There’s a cacophony of noise around them—important noise, the voices of the other people he _ has to _ take care of—but it has to wait. He’ll deal with it just as soon as he has Lance pliant and boneless and in awe, warmsafe_pretty _ the way he should be.

He talks right into the meat of Lance’s neck. The minute pulse of his racing heartbeat, that infinitely tiny jump beneath the flesh, leaves little smears of sweat against Keith’s teeth. He wants to reach in with a finger and spread it across his gums like cocaine. “It’s okay, it’s okay, I’ll kill them if they come near you, I’ll fucking _ kill _ them, you’re mine, I’ll take care of you, minemineminemine_mine_…”

And _ there _ it is; the faintest hint of cinnamon: trust, rough to the touch and uncertain; the first inklings of Lance’s belief in Keith’s protective abilities, even if it’s still steeped in superfluous fear. And alongside it something earthy; something that has his tongue snaking out to taste it on Lance’s skin. It’s barely there, but it’s unmistakable, a bitter, alcoholic edge of pure vanilla and pungent human musk.

Lance is _ turned on_.

Not very. He probably doesn’t even realize it.

But he _ is_.

Something starts to jam itself against his side; several somethings. Hard somethings. Legs—boots, attempting to wriggle into the non-space between him and Lance, along with stupid requests that make no sense. ‘_Stop it_,’ as if he could; ‘_deep breaths_,’ as if he isn’t huffing straight doses of Lance on every one; ‘_get off him,_’ as if the last two words of that sentence aren’t in the wrong order. He’s content to ignore it, to keep nibbling at the trace arousal in Lance’s sweat until it blooms out of every pore in swaying strings, like seaweed, but he can tell Lance is bothered. He can hear it in his panicked tone (“_Keith?! Keith!..._” fuck, he’s really going to have to stop saying his name like that if he wants anything after it to get through).

And then something else catches his attention. Something pressing enough to have him perking up preternaturally fast, head cocked.

Footsteps.

Burnt sugar in the air.

_ Galra_.

He nuzzles under Lance’s jaw one more time, places the approximation of a kiss there (mostly with his teeth), and murmurs, “_Later_,” with visions of his own tongue leaving smears of galra blood over Lance’s skin. And then he’s yielding to Krolia and Shiro, letting their legs propel him backward, letting the momentum get him going so he’s got his feet under him and is launching himself at the door right as it opens.

He catches the first one—the big one—off guard. It raises its arm at the last second to defend itself, and Keith’s fangs sink into the rough wrappings there. He clamps down until his jaw cracks, jerks his neck back and forth until his spine is screaming at him and the tips of his teeth breach the fabric and two drops of blood snake along the enamel like ink drawn along the fine lines in a fingerprint and he can _ taste it_, taste the sick organic life in every cell of that blood, and he growls even as the galra roars in pain and flings him violently enough to have him crashing into the opposite wall.

The other one, the multicoloured one, is wrinkling its nose at him by the time he’s done wheezing at the impact, crawling to his knees even as Shiro urges him not to, as the smell of Krolia’s horror (concentrated, unreleased, her attention honed on their captors) makes his stomach turn. It bares its fangs at him.

“_Gross_,” it says. “Really? The great Voltron can’t afford inhibitors?”

The big one is holding its arm, glaring at him, rage wafting off it in waves of okra and anise. He rushes it again, makes to tear back into those teensy flesh wounds and rip them the fuck open until he can run his tongue along the milky white nerve in her forearm and watch her fingers twitch, but Krolia’s boot catches him in the stomach. It takes the air out of him. He has to take a few more rattling breaths from his knees.

There’s talking, then. Surprise and recognition in the voices he needs to protect. The overwhelming stench of worry and fury and galran bloodlust. Unimportant conversation when he should be wrist deep in their fucking chest cavities by now.

“_Finally_,” the little one says, and he can smell the relief on it’s breath, and he’s readying himself as surreptitiously as he can with Krolia still beside him. “Which one is our first victim? Think feisty kitty over there is sweet on someone?”

The big one smirks. “He’s _ rank_. He must be.”

They smell giddy, like popcorn on the edge of burning. “_Don’t react if you want to save them,_” Krolia hisses in his ear, and _ there_. _ Finally _ some important words. He tastes the truth in them, and it’s more the instinct to protect than anything else that has him settling on his heels.

The little one approaches Pidge first, and he can hear the knife before he sees it, a high-pitched, metallic _ shing _ cutting the air. The fucker is sharp. And Pidge is _ so _ brave, fear smell even, eyes sharp and calculating, his little spitfire teammate.

He stays on his knees.

Hunk next, the big one’s hand wrapping around his throat, tight enough that Keith can hear the little restriction in his already terrified breathing. He can smell the paralysis on him (like fake lemons), the chemical reaction trying to make his body shut down, and Hunk fights it, staying shakily standing, and Keith wants to sink his fangs into the nape of his neck in a soothing gesture to let him know just how proud he is of his bravery.

He stays on his knees.

They almost get him with Shiro. That meaty fist goes flying from Hunk’s neck to Shiro’s face in a feinted punch, stopping millimetres short. It has him twitching forward, instinctively making to bite at that hand before he can reign himself in. It helps that Shiro doesn’t flinch, is so calm and patient, that contained danger pushing ever closer to the surface. It reminds Keith that he can handle himself.

He stays on his knees.

And then that knife.

That pretty pretty knife.

Is approaching his pretty pretty Lance.

“Oh, you smell that, Ezor?” the small one goads. “I think we’re onto something.”

His restraints cut into his wrists with how hard he’s working them behind his back. The smell of his own blood doesn’t help; the thick, coagulating feel of it running down his fingers. He’s bitten his tongue at some point; more blood gurgles in his throat. It doesn’t cover up the taste of Lance’s sweat, still sinking below his gumline.

“You got a soft spot for the pretty boy?” the big one taunts.

The knife gets close enough that Keith can hear the minute _ plick _ of the metal hitting the skin. He can make out the microscopic tug at the flesh, the barest threat of a cut. Lance’s fear skyrockets; blocks out every other smell in the room even as its bathed in a sort of resolute citrus refusal to give in (_fuck_, he shouldn’t have to be courageous like this; Keith loves it, loves that he’s _fiercestrongcapable_ everything he needs in a mate, but he _ should be safe Keith should be keeping him safe_).

“Three times,” Keith chokes out around a growl.

The little one looks amused. “Hmm?”

“Whatever you do to him,” he says, low and rolling and livid, “I’ll do to you three times.”

One of them snorts—the big one, he thinks. He doesn’t know. All he knows is the smell of Lance’s red life welling to the surface under that sharp edge as it’s dragged down his cheek. He knows the smell of Lance’s pain—adrenaline undercut with endorphins and the inside of his dehydrated mouth as he sucks in a sharp breath. He knows the sight of silver slipping less than a millimetre out of view below the skin, and the barest pale line in its wake before little saccharine bubbles come welling up and lazily rupture.

He doesn’t see red so much as he sees static. He lunges, but the big one is anticipating it. It practically clotheslines him. He makes a sick heaving noise as he feels his trachea threaten to give. It stomps a boot into the restraints behind his back, trapping him awkwardly on his side, and as he writhes against the hold he feels his left shoulder pop. He uses the extra maneuvering room to try and pop the other one out, maybe slip his arms up over his head, but it doesn’t want to give. 

“Sheesh, _ look _ at him,” the little one laughs. The edge of its knife is red; _ the edge of its knife is red _ and the creak of Lance’s gritted teeth is louder than the crack of Keith’s shoulder _ finally _ coming out, but he still can’t get his fucking arms in front of him. He thrashes against the big one’s hold; kicks at a meaty calf and gets one in kind to the back of his knee for his trouble. “It’s like he’s feral or something.”

He’s saying something; spitting it, really, splattering the ground with blood and saliva. “Threetimesthreetimesthreetimesthreetimes…” The little one brings the knife to Lance’s other cheek. “_I’llfuckingeatyourlungsinthreefuckingbitesyouwhore… _”

Sirens. Lights. Gentler smells taking the edge off: hesitance and confusion (limes and rotten pineapple). The pressure lifts from his bonds and he heaves forward onto his still dislocated shoulders, shimmying across the floor until he can finally get himself between Lance and that knife. The little one seems to take pleasure in it; it holds the blade steady and lets Keith drag his own face along it as he forces himself over top of Lance again. And he can feel the way Lance is trembling; smell the seawater he’s steadfastly holding inside his tear ducts; hear the exact timbre of the crack in his voice as he says Keith’s name. The galra retreat as he licks up the side of Lance’s face, over the cut there. His blood is a sick sweet reminder of Keith’s failure. He murmurs how sorry he is right into the breached skin, as if it’ll make his words sink in deeper.

“We don’t have time for this,” Krolia says. “This is it. The next time that door opens, we have to overwhelm the guards.”

“Um, Keith? Keith, can you listen to me?”

He nuzzles down below Lance’s ear again, so he can feel the vibration of it when he talks. “I’m listening.”

“I need you to, uh,” Lance clears his throat. “You want to protect us, right?”

Keith nods. That cinnamon edge of trust is on Lance again, stronger this time, along with a musty hesitance.

“And you want to,” Lance pauses; continues quieter, “You want to protect _ me_, right?”

Keith pulls back to look him in the eye. There’s a weird yellow tinge to the blue; the reflection from his own eyes, he realizes after a moment, transfixed. He likes the look of it: him reflected on Lance.

“I am _ going _ to protect you,” he says. “I’m going to protect _ all _ of you and they’re going to fucking _ pay _for what they did to you I–”

Then Lance is leaning forward, shoving his face into Keith’s jaw. And even though Keith can smell the nervousness in it, the uncertainty, there’s also so much cinnamon it makes him dizzy. “Okay,” Lance says gently. “Okay, that’s good. That’s good. If you want to protect me, I need you to get up.”

Keith hesitates. He doesn’t want to get far enough away to let anyone close enough to do to Lance what that _ thing _had done.

Lance retreats and looks him in the eye again. “Keith.” His voice has a stronger edge to it. Gunpowder starts wafting off him. _ Authority_. “Get up for me.”

He gets up.

“Your shoulders…” The concern and faint wet dirt nausea smell coming off Allura has his jaw clenching. He _ hates _ it. He craves her usual smell: like coming rain, the power of a storm in the distance, a little electricity in the air. Or her smell during a fight, the storm unleashed, muddy and encompassing. He _ hates _ that he’s put this sour smell on her.

“I’m fine,” he insists, “Don’t worry, I’m fine.” He sniffs at the air and frowns when her smell doesn’t change.

“Keith, I want you to stay back.”

He scoffs at his mother. “I’m going to _ protect _ you. _ All _ of you.”

“Keith?” Lance starts, then says again with more of that gunpowder smell in it, “Keith. You and I will take the rear. We’ll – you’ll focus on protecting me.”

A little of the density goes out of the air—approval, from most of the room’s occupants. And still cinnamon under it all, even though it’s soaked in so much worry.

He settles himself against the wall ahead of Lance, ignoring the screaming pain in his shoulders (the screaming pain in his entire body). He’s so focused on keeping Lance’s scent at the forefront of his attention that he can’t quite make sense of the scuffling sounds and smells from the other side of the door. When it finally slides open, it’s only Lance’s arm braced over his chest that stops him taking one of the little mice in his jaws and clamping down before he can recognize what it is.

Allura bends down to speak with them, and there are yet more useless words wrapped around all the ones that actually _ mean something_, like “Coran,” and “Acxa” (he will kill her, rip her, _ eviscerate her _ if she’s done anything to Coran). And then there are keys in Krolia’s hands and bindings being let loose and he’s fidgeting, growling lowly by the time she reaches him. He’s the last one left in cuffs, and she hesitates as he turns around and impatiently offers his bloodied wrists.

“Keith…”

He jerks his wrists again, and she winces.

“At least let me…I’m so sorry, Keith…”

She reaches out, but instead of slipping the key into his bindings, her hands wrap around his forearm and shove it viciously upward. His shoulder pops back in with an unholy flare of pain he barely feels. “Just let me _go_,” he insists, even as she does the same thing to the other arm with a grinding crunch.

“Keith…” God, how can Shiro be so calm with all that potential energy inside him? Keith can understand, now, how he survived as a gladiator. He stinks with internal power. His control over it, the fact that he has it so tightly on lockdown, is almost irritating. Keith knocks his forehead against his brother’s broad chest and nudges it back and forth in an encouraging gesture. He wants to smell that power more deeply, wants Shiro to let it out so he can see it firsthand. But the hands on his throbbing shoulders are gentle. They smell of metallic calm in the ocean of worry still flooding the cell. “If we’re going to get out of here, you need to calm down and focus.”

He _ is _ focused. He’s _ hyper _focused. Why can’t they see that?

“I have an idea. Give me the keys." _God_, it’s like Keith can hear the vibration of every individual vocal chord when Lance talks. It’s jarring, but addictive. He wants to nose in against his throat and feel them again. And when his fingers curl around his arms, just above his cuffs, Keith can’t help but lean back into him, inhaling until it makes his shoulders shift sorely, chasing cinnamon and trying to tempt out that whiff of aroused vanilla again with the arch of his back. 

“I’m going to let you go, but I need you to stick with me,” Lance says, right against Keith’s ear. It makes his eyelids flutter. The scent of his own burgeoning arousal spikes. Krolia coughs and takes a step back. “I need you to stay right beside me. No running off. I’m...I’m your number one priority, okay?”

Keith nods, and the cuffs fall away, and before they’ve hit the ground he’s turned around with Lance in his arms. “Easy, _ easy_, your shoulders…” he’s saying, but that’s silly. Fuck his shoulders when he has Lance pressed against him like this, his fangs against his throat again, one hand buried in his hair and the other around his waist. He can smell the way his own blood has smeared over Lance’s armour; him on Lance on him on Lance, _ god _ he’d have him right now if he could.

(Krolia nearly gags, and has no answer except for, “..._scent_…” when Allura asks her what’s wrong.)

“When we get out of this,” he promises quietly, “The _ second _ I have you alone…”

Lance swallows audibly, and Keith gets a hint of vanilla.

And then they’re off, all of them, searching for Coran. It puts Keith on edge, being behind everyone like this. He keeps a grip on Lance’s wrist, and that makes him feel a little better, at least, but he should be _ leading_. He should be flowing through the ship like a plague, taking down every last galra who’s had the audacity to threaten his family.

He smells Coran’s blood before they reach him, and it’s very abruptly Lance’s hand around his wrist as he makes instinctually to run. “With me,” he murmurs, “Stay with me.”

It’s hard. It’s so hard. Altean blood is strong, and the smell of Coran’s has Keith’s jaw aching as he bites down on nothing. He’s hurt; _ someone hurt him _ and _ Keith should already have his claws in their fucking eye sockets _. 

Instead, it’s Allura who gets the takedown, knocking a sizeable galra out from behind. (The smell of the storm in her; he’s so fucking proud, so fucking tempted to join in the hunt.) He compromises—he and Lance catch Coran under each armpit. Keith can practically smell his pain; can hear it in the slur of his words. He starts to shake a little with the effort it takes to stay put instead of stomping his boot into the prone guard’s face (he moves toward the lump of a body, just a little, but Lance’s sharp gunpowder, “_Keith,_” stops him).

They regroup.

They head off to find their helmets and bayards.

But when they find them guarded by two galra, and Coran challenges them loudly before he can be shushed, and they’re forced to break apart to hide, everyone ends up on one side of the doorway, and he ends up on the other. And he knows Lance is hissing at him, “Keith, Keith, _ don’t_,” but it’s so, so quiet under the echoing thumps of the galra guards’ boots. And he can smell them—smell their desire to harm whoever is hiding in the hall, smell the fact that their violence is indiscriminate.

Patience yields focus at the best of times, but with the encroaching threat and the _ It _ in Keith unleashing power straight into his bloodstream, something clicks into place that never has before. Like a little galran part of himself slides in alongside the paladin he is; he’s _ one_, galra-paladin-Keith-leader-_protector _, and when he closes his eyes he can feel his bayard in his hand before it appears there in a flash of red light.

All things considered, he's kind once he rounds the corner.

The first guard goes down with a wet choking noise, Keith’s sword in its esophagus, and its body jumps twice in a macabre dance as it’s used as a shield to block the other's gunfire. Then Keith is flinging it away almost gleefully, and when he swings his sword back around it splatters blood over the remaining guard's face, and it’s with a satisfied snarl he forces his blade between its teeth and up through the top of its head.

“Lance, lead the group, get them out of here.”

He’s already past their grasping hands, running up the hallway. “Where are you going?” Lance cries after him, but Keith knows they’ll just do something nonsensical like try to stop him if he pauses to answer.

There’s a thin veneer of galran blood coating the inside of his lungs; the microscopic leftovers of what he’d done to the things that had threatened his family, and he wants _ more_.

Besides, he has promises to keep.

* * *

Getting back to the lions is a close thing, but he manages.

He almost takes too much time, almost isn’t able to keep his promise, but he makes it. And, _ fuck_, how gorgeously their flesh had split under his claws, three pretty gouges on each of their cheeks. They’d been alive when Acxa had finally convinced him to run, but seeing as their escape involves blowing up the ship, he’s not too worried. More disappointed that he hadn’t been able to see it; to hear the last hysteric inhale and petrified scream of the thing that had hurt people who _ belong to Keith_.

He’s in Black for all of a heartbeat before he’s clinging to Kosmo and zapping into Red, Krolia’s “Kei-!” hardly a whisper to him. And he’s _ on _ Lance, in his lap right there in the pilot’s chair, throwing their helmets onto the floor and licking his tongue over the wound on his cheek again.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers urgently, “I’m so sorry I let them do that.” He burrows under Lance jaw again; allows himself a little nip to the flesh there. “I got them back. Those _ things_, you should have heard how I made them scream for what they did to you…” Their blood is still on his claws. He smears a little of it onto the skin beneath his lips and licks it off jubilantly, drowning in victory and _ Lance_.

He doesn’t notice Romelle’s somewhat panicked screaming, or Kosmo zapping away. His people are safe; all their scents and sounds are now secondary to those coming from the body beneath him. He needs to dig in, to coax out more of that vanilla cinnamon and tamp down all the fear that’s _ still there_. “It’s okay,” he says, “It’s okay, it’s okay, you’re okay and you’re _ mine_, just let me show you…”

Kosmo zaps back in, and Keith doesn’t have to raise his head to know the wolf isn’t alone. He can smell Krolia and Shiro and Acxa with him; can barely make out their frivolous ramblings.

“Here, it’s okay, I have more, just take them…” There’s a distinct scent of nervousness around Acxa, and it puts him on edge. He eyes the newcomers warily from where he’s tucked into Lance’s body. He watches as she passes something to his mother, palm to palm, and he doesn’t like that _ at all_.

“Leave us alone,” he requests sternly, and straightens his spine until he can tuck Lance’s head against his chest possessively (there’s only a little resistance, easily ignored).

“We just want to help you, Keith.” The smell of Shiro’s pumping adrenaline tells Keith that his brother’s words are insincere.

“Then go away.”

“I’m just going to give you a little something.” The things in Krolia’s palm are revealed to be two needles, field grade, ready for quick injection. “Something to make you feel better.”

Keith bares his teeth. “I feel fine. I feel _ more _ than fine.” He’ll feel like a fucking _ god _ just as soon as they leave him to lavish the attention on Lance that he deserves.

And then hands, guiding his head down, guiding his gaze back to Lance's eyes. “Keith, hey…” Fuck, just his voice has him nestling into the bracket of those hands. “Will you do something for me?”

“_Anything_, I’ll do anything for you, _ everything _ for you…”

“Take what they want to give you.”

He leans back; looks down at Lance along the bridge of his nose. It makes no _ sense_, what he’s saying. The vials in Krolia’s hand smell bland, like porridge, like nothing he wants inside him when Lance is _ right there_, ready to pull the fire out of every one of his capillaries.

“For me?” Lance urges. “I promise you can...you can do whatever you want afterward. Anything at all if you just take the...”

Keith snatches the needles with a grunt, so quick even his mother is surprised by it. He jabs them against his own neck and hears them deploy with a hiss, and then tosses them back in Krolia’s general direction. “There,” he says. “Now…”

He blinks.

“Now…”

The colour drains from the world; slow, like there’s a giant desaturation slider somewhere. Blackness encroaches from the sides until he’s blind, and the volume goes down, and smells filter away, and for just a second he’s floating in dark viscous nothing. And then it all comes back, just as slow but half as intense, blurry around the edges like he’s looking out from behind a wrinkled sheet of plastic wrap.

He’s in Lance’s lap.

Barbed ice picks are ramming themselves repeatedly into his shoulders and wrists, shards of glass running through his veins and spreading out until his entire torso is throbbing.

He tastes so much blood.

_ He is in Lance’s lap _.

“Now just...take a breath…” Shiro says, all paternal calm, palms up as if he’s afraid Keith is going to bite one of them.

It hurts so much it makes him want to puke, but Keith scrambles off Lance’s lap and clutches Kosmo by the back of the neck and zaps back into Black. For the second time in less than ten minutes, he cuts off his mother: “Kei–!”

He doesn’t look at Lance.

* * *

He knows, logically, he can’t run forever. He’s the paladin of the black lion, the _ head _ of Voltron.

What he _ can _ do is run for now, and he does a pretty good job of it considering the state he’s in. He homes in on the nearest planet with a breathable atmosphere and gets there in record time with the comms shut firmly off and makes it a shaky hundred feet from Black before he collapses.

Distantly, he hears another lion coming in for a landing. He makes it to his knees before he really is throwing up, right there in the dust (god, the _ sick fucking things _ he’d thought; the way he’d thought of them as _ it_s instead of _ she_s; the way he’d dug his claws in and _ dragged _ and fucking _ loved _ the little resistant tug in the flesh…).

And then he’s taking one staggering, half-step forward, and then another, and then pitching forward into blackness.

* * *

His dreams smell like cinnamon and vanilla and gunpowder and salt.

* * *

He wakes up groggy, staring out from Black’s healing pod.

On the other side of the glass, Lance is staring back.

Keith closes his eyes; tries to sink back into the dream, but Lance is already reaching for the control panel. He’s curiously quiet, totally quip-less, as he releases the lid with a hiss and helps Keith to sit up with an arm under his shoulders.

It makes Keith blush, and the fact that he’s blushing just makes him blush harder, almost in anger. There are two sudden pricks on his neck, and the soft hiss of a field injection. He jerks away from Lance, glaring.

The other man holds up the needles guiltily. “Sorry,” he says, “Krolia made me promise you’d take two more inhibitors and I thought you’d get weird about it if I asked first.” He takes a long look at Keith, still red in the face and glowering. “Or...weird-_er _ about it.”

“What part about this isn’t weird?!”

“I mean...it’s just your body, it’s totally natural…”

Keith thumps back into the pod with a sigh, and says through his fingers as he buries his face in his hands, “You sound like my first sex ed teacher.”

“Hey.” He feels Lance tug at his wrists, but he keeps his hands planted. His whole body has taken on the odd antiseptic smell of a healing pod. “Hey, Keith, I’m being serious. It’s nothing to be ashamed about. Krolia and Axca explained about the whole spiking thing, it’s totally normal for galra.”

Keith levels a dirty look at him through his fingers. “During _ puberty_,” he counters drily. “I should have been in the clear by now.”

Lance shrugs. “So your human side delayed things a bit, so what? We know now, and we’ll get you on the inhibitor thingies until your alien hormones even out and you’ll be good to go.”

For how nonchalant he’s trying to sound, the silence that stretches afterward is markedly uncomfortable.

“Why are you here?” Keith’s voice is small; tight.

Lance shrugs again. “Someone had to make sure you were alright, and we figured you wouldn’t want to see everyone all at once, seeing as how you freaked right out on us, there.” He’s going for levity, Keith thinks, but it falls flat; rings blatantly untrue.

“No, I mean, why are _ you _ here?”

It’s always a shock for Keith, the moments when Lance drops all fronts and looks at him earnestly. He looks ageless when it happens, simultaneously young and vulnerable and weathered and wise. “I just...thought maybe we should talk. About what happened. And stuff.” 

Keith disagrees. They should never talk about what happened. They should conduct a series of experiments to see where on the skull, and how hard, a person has to be hit in order to forget a full twenty-four hours. 

“So they told you,” he says, still talking through the prison bars of his fingers, “What that meant?” 

“The, uh, whole clingy thing…? Yeah. Yeah, they filled me in on the basics.”

Keith sinks back into his hands.

What is there to fill in beyond the basics?

He’d clung to Lance during his spike because…

He heaves himself up and out of the pod onto shaky legs. Lance has thrown himself mostly over the thing by the time he’s steadied himself, like he’s afraid Keith is going to bolt again. Which is...not an _ un_fair assumption, but he’s too tired. He’d get nowhere. He just finds he can’t look up at Lance anymore, all boxed in like that, when there’s already so much he can’t escape.

“Can I ask you a question?”

Keith nods stiffly.

“Was that part a galra thing or a you thing?”

That has Keith looking at him. He’s all earnest again; all open and resigned and afraid, even sprawled out over a healing pod.

His out is on the tip of his tongue. It would be so easy to put two hands up, and roll his eyes, and say, ‘_Obviously _ a galra thing, Lance, you’re just objectively my body’s type.’

But Lance is looking at him so sincerely.

And there had been cinnamon.

(And vanilla.)

“Me thing, I think,” he says softly.

Lance lets out a ridiculous, heaving, guttural sigh and goes boneless over the pod. “Oh thank _ god_.”

“Wha-?”

“Can you imagine how awkward it would be if you got all hot for Sharpshooter every time your galra time of the month hit? Like try having _ that _ hanging over your head: ‘hey, if your super hot captain runs out of The Pill his alien side is going to want to jump you but his human side isn’t down.’ At least this way it’s mutual.”

For a guy who so often manages to say so little with so many words, it’s remarkable how much Keith has to unpack in those few sentences. 

‘Thank god.’

‘Super hot captain.’

‘It’s mutual.’

_ ‘It’s mutual _.’

Lance seems to have resigned himself to being draped the way he is. He bends one arm at the elbow and props his head in his hand. “A little frazzled there, team leader?”

Keith nods stiffly again.

Lance’s grin turns just a little wry. “Good. Imagine how _ I _ felt. Pine over a guy for years and _ that’s _ how he tells me he’s into me.”

‘Pine over a guy for years.’

‘_Years_.’

By now, Lance’s grin is all teeth, and Keith can see a little of the self-preservation in the humour.

“Anyway,” Lance continues, and then repeats with the vowels drawn out as he slinks off the pod and meanders around to stand beside Keith properly: “Anyway…with all that out of the way…I was just wondering…”

Keith catches up to himself all at once. Lance is so _ himself _ in the moment; defensively funny and forthright and candid and nervous all in a row. It’s a lot to deal with and they have a lot to talk about, but Lance has thanked god, Lance has called him super hot, Lance has told him his crush is mutual and has been for _ years_.

Lance is just wondering…

Keith kisses him suddenly; so suddenly that he lands a little off-target, lips misaligned a little up and to the right. But Lance doesn’t seem to mind all that much; his hands are on Keith’s shoulders almost immediately, and then sliding forward until he’s got his elbows resting there instead, his hands hanging limp at the wrist, holding Keith close without really holding him at all. It’s so casually affectionate it has Keith grabbing him by the waist (tight and a little awkward, nowhere near the relaxed simplicity of Lance’s touch but still miles beyond what he’s used to). 

Lance’s lips are unfairly soft. Keith can feel them curved into a smile even as he tilts his head and leans in heavier and does this little thing where the tip of his tongue darts out (to wet his own lips or tease at Keith’s, the black paladin doesn’t know) and flicks lightly against the spot right beneath his cupid’s bow. It makes him shiver; has him sealing his mouth properly over Lance’s and letting out a humiliating little humming noise, just this side of a moan.

Lance keeps his arms dangling where they are when Keith pulls back. It keeps them in such close proximity that it’s a natural thing for Keith to rest their foreheads together.

“Wanna date me, team leader?”

Considering the fact that they still have so much to deal with (confronting the team after Keith’s spike, telling them about this new development, figuring out between them the finer details of said development in the first place), Keith smiles readily. “Sure,” he says. “Yeah, I really do.”

* * *

All things considered, their starting to date in the wake of a galran hormone spike is probably the least complicated part of their lives over the next few weeks.

It takes a quintant or two for the entire team to relax around Keith again, though he finds out very quickly that there’s a large perk to having an intimidating galra mom: she does most of the legwork in clinically explaining the finer details of gala spiking, and generally gives off the impression that she’s ready to cuff anyone who has a bad word to say about it. (To be fair, the part that Keith isn’t expecting is the fact that her wordless threats are unnecessary; the team is specifically unbothered, almost awkwardly so. It touches him, even if he doesn’t quite know how to express it.) They don’t have much time to focus on it, anyway. Everything goes topsy-turvy so quickly—finding out about their missing time after their fight with Lotor, being shot across the universe to reach home exponentially quicker than expected—they don’t really have the luxury of surprise or discomfort. There’s too much to do.

In fact, everything is so up in the air that Keith finds their relationship normalizing and stabilizing far faster than he’d anticipated. They don’t have time for feeling it out; they learn quickly how to draw more intimate comfort from each other, how to communicate a little clearer. Their first night back on a planet they barely recognize finds Keith burrowed in Lance’s arms, exhausted after meeting so many McClains—all at once, mind you, a scant few weeks into dating his boyfriend (and god, he’s not even used to that word, yet, let alone that fiddly little apostrophe-s and the dreaded fam*ly word after it). He’s a little embarrassed—he has no one to introduce Lance to, after all, aside from a wet patch of grass and a cheap headstone with ‘Kogane’ chiseled into it—and the two of them together are still reeling at the mere idea of being _ home _.

So it’s kind of an achievement when, a few weeks into their whirlwind of a homecoming, as they’re all preparing for galran invasion, Lance manages to actually surprise Keith.

“I’m sorry, what?” Keith asks, data pad loose in his fingers, report on bioweapon defense systems forgotten.

“I said,” Lance says, and he has the gall to sound a little exasperated, “Would you be willing to fuck me without your inhibitors?”

Okay, so Lance has been, objectively, incredibly chill about the whole ‘my boyfriend is navigating the pharmaceutical pitfalls of galran puberty’ thing. The Garrison has already synthesized galran inhibitors, so he and Acxa have access to a basically unlimited supply, but it’s Lance who’d gone to bat for him, insisting that _ no, _ Keith _ wouldn’t _ be trudging down to the med bay every Tuesday morning for an injection. He’d crossed his arms and argued up the chain of command until they’d agreed to give their resident half-galra private stashes. And every week, Lance shows up and smiles and chats and pretends he’s not there to make sure Keith takes his medicine (even though he always takes a second after the twin hiss of deployment to kiss the little stinging pinpricks on his boyfriend’s neck).

He’s made the whole thing just another part of their routine; something Keith is able to ignore for whole days at a time. They don’t have to talk about it, they just deal with it. Lance bringing it up so suddenly and bluntly is already out of left field, let alone the _ context _ he’s bringing it up in.

“You want me to…”

“Go all Dark Phoenix and then wreck me, yeah. With the teeth and the eyes and the sexy growly-growly.”

Keith doesn’t get the reference.

He doesn’t get the request.

He doesn’t get how Lance can be so nonchalant, not even looking at Keith as he scrolls through a chat on his data pad and proposes kinky alien sex.

Keith’s pad drops from his fingers. It bounces just so off the couch cushions and cracks on the corner of the coffee table (just a hairline, but still, Iverson will give him grief about it). Finally, Lance looks up at him, and his unruffled smirk melts into something more concerned when he clocks the deer-in-headlights expression on Keith’s face.

“Oh god,” he says, and has the foresight to approach with caution, data pad left on the counter in the kitchenette where he’d been perched on a stool. “Okay, just breathe. I’m sorry, I wanted to be cool about it, but...” He sits gingerly on the couch and put one careful hand on Keith’s stiff knee. “...maybe that was a little too cool?”

“Yeah.” Keith looks over, and the sight of those blue eyes wide with encouragement is enough to calm him somewhat. “Yes, definitely, way too cool about it.”

Lance laughs, but he rubs his thumb absently back and forth on Keith’s knee while he does it (an unconscious gesture he seems to have picked up whenever he wants to let Keith know that his levity isn’t mean-spirited). ”Okay, from the top,” he says, “Let’s talk about this.”

Keith breathes deep.

They talk about it.

The conversation smells like blooming lilacs, uncertainly sweet (and more underneath that; spice and alcohol and black confection).

And in the end, Keith agrees.

(He still doesn’t understand that “Dark Phoenix” reference, though, and Lance gives up on trying to explain it to him with an annoyingly endearing pout.)

* * *

It’s an antsy Tuesday when Keith skips his inhibitors. He tells the team he’s come down with a cold and Lance insists on locking himself away to play nurse with his “ailing” boyfriend. Then it’s a matter of waiting, and it becomes apparent an hour in that they’d really underestimated how taxing this part would be.

Lance is in Keith’s lap by hour two.

“You need to—ah, _ ha_, fuck—you need to stop that if you want this to last until I spike,” Keith says, head tilted back, hands gripped in Lance’s hair while he sucks firmly on one nipple and then the other, alternating with long strokes of his tongue. He’s already half hard in his sweats, arching his back, unsure whether he’s trying to get Lance closer or push him away.

“Bet you it wouldn’t matter,” Lance mumbles, “Bet you could still get it up for me once the juices get flowing.”

Keith laughs, nose crinkling at the bridge. “Don’t use the word ‘juices,’ it’s gross.”

“You’re gross.” He switches his technique; starts flicking just the tip of his tongue in a way that has Keith twisting into the new sensation. He’s still laughing a little, a couple _ ha'_s falling out along with his groan. It’s one of his favourite things about the way he and Lance have fallen in together: the physicality between them has followed their dynamic; has immediately included competition and good-natured ribbing and a push-pull that makes the mood unkillable. He laughs, and groans, and gasps, and pokes fun, and still wants to fuck this man _ so badly_.

“Lance,” he starts with a chuckle (with a moan) before his throat clamps shut on the rest of his sentence.

Ants crawl up out of every hair follicle on his body, up toward his head where they pile up until they’re falling all over each other, pouring over his face and down his back and starting the trek upward all over again in chains by the dozen. 

Fuck cinnamon and vanilla, they smell like a whole tea room.

He makes a thick, viscous sound in his throat. The air is herbal with their combined arousal. There’s no fear smell, no oily overtone that makes him want to vomit with the need to dispose of the threat. It’s all rich, sweet-savoury smells; the kind that go in through the nose and stick heavy on the palate. Cinnamon, vanilla, cocoa, nutmeg, cloves, cumin, molasses…

And Lance.

Underneath (on top of, surrounding, seeping out of) it all, _ Lance_.

“Keith?” The _ hotwetstrongyes _ sensation against his left nipple stops. He realizes he’s gone very still. “Keith, is this it?”

Lance’s voice is clear; bright. There are no corners to it. It rolls around Keith’s head and he can’t seem to catch it. Something creeps in at the edges of his scent, like worry but less acidic: _ anticipation_.

He’s _ excited _ that Keith is spiking.

He’s fucking _ warmsafepretty_**_horny_ ** the way he should be, the way he should have been the first time around, the way Keith is going to keep him while he makes him beg because he’s Keith’s, Keith’s, Keith’sKeith’s_Keith’s_…

He kisses Lance hard. In retrospect, he might be a little rough, dragging his face up with little regard, but his boyfriend doesn’t pay it any mind. The anticipation in his scent skyrockets. Keith can feel intimately the shape of him where he pulses in his own sweatpants, hard against his hip. He can taste the subtle differences between his cheeks and his gums and his teeth. He can feel the minute shift of the muscle in his tongue as he kisses back; can hear the little rush of blood in the vein running along the underside of it. 

“Ah!” Lance pulls back quickly. Keith doesn’t need to look to know that there’s blood. He can smell it; can taste it where every red cell is spread across the tip of one fang. He’s not used to them, so he’s slipped and nicked Lance’s lip. He chases the guilty scent and soothes it with a lick.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, but his panic is only momentary. The bitter vanilla in the air catapults. He smirks. “Did you _ like _—?”

Lance is kissing him again, and that’s nice. It’s _ nice_, but…

The couch is small-ish (generous for Garrison suites, though, so they don’t complain), so he has to be careful as he twists and pushes Lance onto it. He cradles the back of his head to save him conking it on the armrest and settles between his legs. It means he has to brace his own knees at an awkward angle and Lance’s foot is resting on the floor but he doesn’t care because he finally finally _ finally _ has Lance underneath him.

He’s open—mouth, eyes, face—wide open, like he’s surprised at his own arousal, or maybe at Keith’s sudden predatory calm.

“Do you know what I’m going to do?” Keith muses, nosing in under Lance’s jaw, reaching down to pull his hips up into a firm grind with one hand. “Do you know what I’m going to do with you now that I have you all pretty like this?”

His heart is beating so fast. There’s so much blood near the surface of him, turning his face red, making him hard, drying in the minute cut on his lip. “No,” he whispers, and there’s wonder in it. “I don’t.”

Keith nips at him, careful with his fangs. “Of course you don’t,” he says, “You can’t have any idea what I’m going to do to you. You’ve never felt the way I’m going to make you feel.” He pushes himself up so he can see the faint yellow reflection of himself in those blue eyes. “You’re _ mine_, and you don’t even have any idea what that fucking means yet.”

“Holy _ shit_, Keith…” Submission is a good look on Lance. Not that he’s usually _ dominant_, per se; he’s just _ eager_, and his eagerness has always been a boisterous brand. He likes to please; likes to climb on top and meander his way down and laugh right into the junction of Keith’s hip because he knows the way it makes the black paladin squirm. His touches come with fewer hesitations, so it’s natural that he ends up guiding them along more often, push-starting them when Keith gets stalled along the way.

It’s a nice change, the lax assent on his face, the way he keeps clenching and unclenching his hands where they’ve landed above his head, like he’s stopping himself from reaching out the way he usually would. Keith takes them in hand, grip gentle on Lance’s wrists. “That’s right, you’re so good,” he praises, and widens his awkward perch on the couch so he can press downward in a lewd promise. “So good. So _ strong_, but you’re going to lay there and take whatever I give you, aren’t you?”

It’s a strange sort of subdued hysteria that slips over him. He wants wants _ wants_, but the things he wants are so drawn out and slow. He hadn’t known it was possible to be so gently frenzied, like going limp into a whirlpool, but here he is. He attacks Lance’s neck, technically. He bites and sucks and lets his fangs dig in just enough to show him that Keith is _ dangerouspowerfulwicked _ but that Lance has nothing to worry about because it’s all _ for _him. But it’s an attack in slow motion. The skin turns pink, and then red, and then edges toward purple. It slips out of Keith’s mouth as Lance wriggles against the pleasure, but he patiently chases it down again until it’s a mess he can no longer pick apart the separate marks in.

Lance’s arms work with more purpose as the minutes go by, until Keith has to bear down to keep him still. “Keith, fuck, _ fuck_, more, I want more…”

He smells like gunpowder again, but this time it’s been packed into bullets. It’s contained; the illusion of safety with a deadly bang laying in wait. He’s _ allowing _ himself to be restrained; asking for it when he has the clear option to fight for it instead.

“Gonna fuck you,” Keith promises, and his voice has taken on an irregular lilt as his fangs have grown to their full size. “Gonna fuck you _ right now_.”

He’s so high-strung he can practically feel the pressure differential when Lance inhales. “Yeah?”

Keith digs into the collar of Lance's t-shirt with his teeth. It tugs at the back of Lance’s neck; catches; and then his fangs rip in and he yanks hard and the thing rips jaggedly from shoulder to waist. He doesn’t even bother tearing it the rest of the way, just leaves the damage to frame Lance’s exposed chest and starts working his tongue over one nipple. Lance’s hands scrabble at his shoulders when he releases them to start tugging his sweats down, but he doesn’t mind. There’s no intent to them, just the need for purchase.

His hand is wrapping around Lance as soon as he has the pants down past his knees. It’s silly in its impatience; forces him to awkwardly shimmy over the things as Lance uses his legs to work them the rest of the way off. But it’s what he needs: Lance’s cock hard in his grip, every miniscule, curving pulse leaching right into the skin of his palm. He doesn’t tease, like he usually would; doesn’t try to goad Lance with grazes. He grips tight and sweeps his wrist upward. He likes a twist, himself, right under the head, but Lance prefers it with less fanfare once the flirting is done, and Keith gives it to him that way right off the top.

“Oh,” Lance gasps, “O–oh, you really mean right n—_ay, puta madre puta madre puta madre_—!”

It’s a difficult decision, tearing himself away from Lance’s nipples (there are so many more ways to toy with them, after all, and Keith is overwhelmed trying to test them all out). But he ducks down and buries his face between his legs, and it’s more than worth it to hear the litany of surprised Spanish.

This part is viscerally organic. The tea room smells are still pressing in on him, but this is all human (_Lance_) on his tongue. It’s earthy, lingering in his sinuses, not sweet or salty or bitter but somehow all three. He’s practically curled at the end of the couch, and the canting of Lance’s hips has Keith off-target as often as he’s on, but he works his boyfriend open with single-minded diligence.

Lance doesn’t seem to know what to do with any of his limbs. His legs wrap around Keith’s shoulders and then splay open, one perched on the backrest and the other shoved beneath the coffee table. He covers his face with his hands, then bites at one balled fist, then grips the armrest above his head. Keith keeps his eyes focused upward; watches keenly the way the muscles bunch up beneath the skin of Lance’s chest; the way everything about him becomes so fucking _ onedgeperfectKeith’s. _

It’s like Keith doesn’t even have to breathe. His lightheadedness is distant. It’s secondary to the way Lance is moaning like it hurts. His hips get a little too out of control, so Keith abandons his cock to grab them and pull them more firmly against his face. He gets a momentary silence in return, as Lance seems to try to breathe in through a closed throat. 

He doesn’t know how long he goes on for. His world becomes a Jackson Pollock painting: dissonance and olfactory overload and flashes of Lance all mashed together in a pile of random-looking splotches, a stunning piece of modern art-not-art when experienced all at once.

“Fuck me,” Lance is begging by the time Keith deems him pliant enough. He’s shaking all over, one hip working more than the other as if fighting off a cramp. “Fuck me, please, _ fuck me_…” 

Keith pulls himself up without pomp. He digs his claws into his pants and tears them down both sides; bits of them stay clinging to his legs, but he pays little attention. He’s hard, leaking at the tip, but he notes the fact that he’s so incredibly turned on as if through healing pod glass, distorted and muffled. He grabs the bottle of lube they’d left on the coffee table and coats the fingers of his right hand, and when a little drips down onto Lance’s stomach, he can’t help the growl he lets out. He can hear it plop against the skin, smell the chemicals mix with his sweat, see the way the drop catches on the fine hairs of his treasure trail.

“God, you’re hot like this.” Fuck, Lance practically sounds _ drunk_. “Come on, please, I want you to...Keith…?”

It’s divine, the wet little noise Lance’s mouth makes as it falls open. His gaze follows Keith’s hand as it travels down and around his own hip, disappearing from view. He shoves two fingers inside himself with no preamble, and even though he’s not touching Lance at all, his boyfriend jerks as if he’s the one being entered. “Keith…?” he says again.

Keith doesn’t answer. His head lowers, his focus relentless. He wraps his left hand around himself and strokes fast, with that _ twist_, and offers no explanations beyond, “Ah, fuck. _ Fuck_.”

He comes in thirty seconds flat, thrusting into his palm and back against his fingers like he’s pissed off about it.

“Oh, _ shit_.” Lance twitches violently as Keith’s come splatters over him. The black paladin aims carefully, so it lands over his boyfriend’s still-hard dick, laying red and ignored against his stomach. His orgasm isn’t enough to quell whatever urges have taken over him, but even if it were, Keith is positive that the sight of his own come pooling obscenely beneath Lance’s cock would have him ready to go again. “_Shit_, yeah, that’s hot.”

Keith can’t help his smirk; can’t help the pleasure he takes in Lance’s shock when he pulls his fingers out of himself and picks up his boyfriend’s dick and makes sure it’s covered with a slick mess of come and lube. “Keith,” Lance breathes, “You’re _ not_…” 

Keith readjusts; brackets his legs around Lance’s hips.

“No _ fucking way_…”

It fucking hurts when he sinks down onto Lance. The stretch is intense after his cursory, utilitarian fingering. But that raw feeling, the strain that’s just this side of unbearable, makes him queasy with arousal. He forces his body open around Lance, and the exertion of it, the pressure, is enough to make up for the lack of specific physical gratification.

“Ah _ ha_, holy fu-_huck_, hah _ ah _ what the _ fuck_…” Lance sputters in a mixture of laughter and moaning and awe. He watches himself disappear into Keith with his hands gripped in his own hair, like he’s losing his mind.

“Told you,” Keith growls, “Fucking told you, you have no idea what it means to be _ mine_.” He picks himself up and lets gravity force him back down on the last syllable.

Lance wails.

Keith rides him brutally. He pulls far enough off that Lance’s head batters against the tightest part of him on every thrust, chasing the discomfort of the threat of slipping out. The slight tack of the come-lube mixture is debauched and addictive. He can feel a general sort of pressure against his most sensitive spots, and he pushes himself further into it; he rages against the pain in pursuit of the morbid carnal _ yes _ of it all.

“I’m close already,” Lance warns, and his hands grab at Keith’s waist (like that’s going to do anything but spur him on: those long, sinful fingers leaving bruises between his ribs). “Fuck, hold on, I’m close…”

“Good,” Keith says, and grinds down harder with a little swivel. “Come inside me.”

Lance’s orgasm is pandemonium for Keith. It’s beyond an increase in the arousal scents; beyond being able to feel the warm swell of every single pulse inside him. He feels Lance come as if he’s coming himself, again. He watches new drops of sweat break the surface tension at the top of every pore. He hears the _ shuh-shuh-shuh _ noise of Lance’s left leg trying to find a foothold and slipping off the armrest over and over. He can smell the damp spaces where his moans are reverberating in his chest.

“K-Kei—ah, st-sto—_fuck_…”

“Not done with you,” Keith says, and leans down, and keeps fucking himself on Lance’s spent cock. “Not _ nearly _ fucking done with you.”

He smells the salt before he sees the tears slip from Lance’s eyes. He licks at one of them. It tastes like the exact kind of too much that it _is_ when he refuses to stop.

He’s going a little numb by the time Lance is tensing between his legs again. His knuckles have gone white on Keith’s thighs. Every huffed breath comes out as a sob. Keith has to pick up the remains of his shirt and put them under his hands when he braces so he doesn’t slip off his sweat slick chest. “Please, please, please,” he chants, not asking for anything in particular (asking for _ everything _in particular). He’s thrusting up clumsily, lost in the pursuit of his own arduous orgasm.

When Keith finally wraps a hand around himself again, it makes him clench around Lance in a way that has them both groaning. “Come on,” he grits, jerking himself with little finesse, high on the sensory overload of his spike. “Come on, show me I fucking deserve you…”

His own words get him off; he comes before Lance does. He catches a glimpse of his yellow eyes reflected in Lance’s blue, right there in the centre of his wrecked expression, and it does him in. He sees every detail in it, him on Lance on him on Lance…

He can’t stand it; can’t _ stand _ the layers of them all stacked up perfectly so he doesn’t know how he’s going to function when he has to be his own body again.

“Fuck you,” he says as he pitches forward over Lance’s body and rejects every urge his body has to stop moving. “_Fuck you_, you’re _ so _ goddamn…”

He comes with a frustrated grunt, right up to Lance’s chin. He’s so...he’s _ so_…

“I can’t,” Lance forces, “I can’t, I _ can’t_...”

He can.

He arches back, thrusts up one, twice, and then goes stiff, face gnarled in half agony. Keith has mercy: he stills and lets Lance spill with little broken off twitches. He’s not even sure he’s fully conscious, blue eyes fluttering and rolling upward, reduced to an id.

“You still with me?” Keith asks, peppering kiss down the side of Lance’s face, rubbing up and down his sides under the remains of his shirt. He’s _ limppretty_**_fucked_ **, the way he should be, all taken care of, all for Keith.

He doesn’t get an answer; pulls little more than a garbled noise of complaint from Lance’s throat as he pulls off his oversensitive cock. He ignores the shakiness in his own legs and stands.

His boyfriend’s grip is loose as Keith picks him up and carries him to the bedroom. Lance shivers when he hits the cool sheets, but Keith is there in another second, pulling him half onto his own chest. He buries his face into damp brown hair and inhales deeply the scent of his docility.

“Get some sleep,” Keith murmurs. “When you wake up, it’s your turn.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Lance mumbles.

* * *

Keith isn’t kidding.

* * *

Their “sick” excuse doesn’t hold up after Lance drowsily presses two inhibitors against Keith’s neck and the black paladin lasts all of twelve seconds before he faceplants.

“It’s like he ran a marathon without any warm up, and then ran another one,” the medic says confusedly, peering at the readout as Keith recovers in a pod. “His muscles are _ shot_.”

Coupled with Lance’s limp, it’s pretty obvious what’s happened. Keith isn’t sure what’s worse: the awkward silence about the whole affair that lasts a solid week, or the breaking of the dam when Pidge intones at Keith during a briefing, “Check yourself before you wreck your Lance.” (Shiro’s sharp, “_Pidge_!” is nowhere near enough to stop the relentless ribbing after that.)

Or maybe it’s when Krolia looks Lance up and down, observing his limp carefully, and then pats Keith on the shoulder. “Strong mate,” she says simply, “Good choice. But be careful, I put your father in the hospital once…” 

(“Oh my god, this was already worth it, but the look on your face…! _ Doubly _ worth it, dude!” Lance guffaws afterward. Keith doubles down on his cringe.) 

By the same token, though, Keith isn’t sure what’s better: the sleepy, dopey grin Lance had given him when they’d finally been able to sleep together again after Keith was released from the med bay, or the way some tiny, incredibly significant switch had flipped between them. They’ve always been a good team, but now their trust is so intrinsic that it’s thoughtless. They talk less and understand more. He finds it more and more difficult to think of anything he’d be uncomfortable approaching Lance about.

“Wanna know what I can’t believe?” Lance asks one night, tucked up against Keith’s back, idly tracing the shell of his ear with two fingers.

Keith hums. “What can’t you believe?”

“I can’t believe we got together…”

Keith grins. 

“...because of your freaky galra period.”

He elbows Lance (still grinning, though).

“Know what I can’t believe?” he retorts, and Lance hums. “I can’t believe you _get off_ on my freaky galra period.”

Lance laughs, and even though he’s not spiking, it smells like cinnamon to Keith.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm doing great with this whole "write shorter, quicker pieces" thing. Just great. Sorry the tone is all over the place, this prompt went off the rails quick. Could have easily tripled the length of it, but I ain't finna delay it anymore. 
> 
> Same deal as always, [come say hi on Twitter if you want.](https://twitter.com/befriendingm)


End file.
